Blessed Meadows For Minor Poets

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

— Flannery O’Connor

At two o’clock in the afternoon on March 18, 1998, while typing up a story on a snowy gray day in Room 8 of the Sunset Motel in Hays, Kansas, I heard the crackle of tires in fresh snow out front. I had recently quit the radio-antenna factory, having saved enough to write for three months before I would have to go back. Though I was forty-two and had given up woman, dog, and comfy job for this writing “career,” my life was not taking any significant shape. If I’d been earmarked for success, I believed, it should’ve happened long ago.

Then someone knocked on my door. It was the FedEx man, standing in the snow. I didn’t know who would be sending me anything FedEx. I signed for the package, thanked him, and closed the door. The letter inside the cardboard envelope read: “It is my pleasure to inform you that Garrison Keillor, guest editor of the 1998 edition of the Best American Short Stories, and I have chosen your story ‘The Blue Devils of Blue River Avenue,’ originally published in The Sun, for inclusion in this year’s volume.”

I thought it must be a joke, though I knew no one who could fabricate such a convincing letter. I had never much liked these Best American Short Stories (BASS), but now, as I reflected on them, I decided they were pretty good after all. I realized this was a huge boost to my “career.” I wondered why they had picked this particular story. It hadn’t been nominated for anything. I’d never gotten one fan letter about it. But I figured that much of what happens in the literary world is a lottery, and I had been plugging away for a while, so maybe it was time for my head to bob to the surface of the sea of drowning writers, if only for a few minutes.

I went next door and showed the letter to my neighbor Chick, who was striving to be a painter and was probably the only one in this residential motel — perhaps in all my circle of working-class acquaintances — who could appreciate what had happened. Chick didn’t know what BASS was, but he recognized the name of Garrison Keillor, and he let out a crow. Chick liked Guinness, so I bought a sixer, and we raised a few creamy black drafts to the snowy gray sky in honor of the lottery that consistently rewards artists who do not deserve to win, but that keeps all us writers, musicians, and painters going by filling us with hope. A reward for mere persistence is not such a bad idea.

My parents were thrilled when they heard the news. They had been patiently putting up with my infinitely slow growth, perpetual pennilessness, and occasional collapses for years. Now they had something to tell the neighbors and relatives, who secretly thought I was a bum — and would secretly continue to do so, since they had never heard of BASS, and I wasn’t rich yet or on television.

The BASS publication paid five hundred dollars — which meant five more weeks away from the factory — plus an additional hundred if my story was deemed fit for an audiotape narrated by Mr. Keillor himself. It was! Imagine that: six hundred dollars for a story that took me only six years to write. If you’re dreaming of the big bucks, fiction writing is definitely the field for you, though you might also consider milk delivery, door-to-door encyclopedia sales, or shoeing cart oxen. I walked around in the clouds for a whole day, telling anyone who would listen about my good luck. But then it was time to get back to work. I’d had my little fling with fortune, and if I wanted another, I’d have to sit down and write for ten more years: buy as many lottery tickets as possible. More important, I hoped to earn enough for one or two more weeks away from the factory.

But then something even stranger happened: The hallowed American publishing house Burns & Sons (not its real name) asked to see my work. Was I under contract, they wanted to know. Did I have an agent? Did I have a novel they could look at? A collection of stories? I told them my dozen novels in progress were all in various states of disrepair, but I had many published stories. They said please send the stories. They couldn’t be serious. I had been knocking myself out for ten years and couldn’t even get an agent, and now one of the largest publishers in the world was blithely asking me to send them a bunch of stories. I thought of stories only as exercises for the novel I would complete one day. No one reads stories. Name me the last collection of short stories that made the bestseller list. Stop a hundred people on the street and see if one can give you the name of a contemporary short-story writer besides Stephen King.

Things got even weirder when B&S decided they would publish my collection. I signed a five-year contract for five thousand dollars up front and five thousand upon delivery of the manuscript. And since the manuscript was already complete (or so I thought), I was suddenly two years away from having to return to manual labor. My future rolled out to the horizon with red carpets, smoking jackets, and trumpet music: the story collection would sell respectably; B&S would take all twelve of my novels (after I’d spun them into dazzling form); I would tour the country, appear on Oprah, and mumble at various university podiums for ten thousand a pop about character development and the need for world peace.

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